


The October Country

by septicwheelbarrow



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Purple Prose, i like purple, so purple that it's black already, so so purple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 22:49:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/septicwheelbarrow/pseuds/septicwheelbarrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames would like autumn, Arthur thinks. Arthur could be autumn before his sharp winter takes over and freezes the laughter into shards. Eames is a hole in his chest where there wasn't one already. But if nothing else, Arthur will have Eames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The October Country

**Author's Note:**

> Possibly the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written. Because I have this image of Arthur breaking bottles by the curb, thanks to Josephine Rowe's beautiful short story Love, which is available online so you should totally read it.
> 
> Non-chronological order. Happy ending, or not, depending on whether you like your spring after winter.

* * *

 

It's always turning late in the year in Barcelona, the city where the people speak autumn words and think autumn thoughts, the city that smells like coffee beans roasted brown and puddles of rain that lure and linger, that city that lives through incomprehensible mosaics and unfinished ruins and the name of an artist ghost.

Arthur does not speak autumn, cannot wrap his tongue and his mind around the subtleties of it, the curling r's like the red rustle of leaves, the consonants flowing over each other like the glide of sunlight against roofs, the crisp vowels like the crust of a bocadillo with a sprig of basil leaves. Eames, he thinks, Eames would speak Spanish, would take to autumn like he's made of it, like he's saved the corners and fissures of himself for it. Eames would take autumn, drag his callused fingers over her skin and kiss her and steal all the sounds from her red, red mouth, dance her underneath him and fill her ears with laughs and whispers, soft, hushed, intimate like an open book drowned in golden light.

Arthur could speak autumn, could be autumn before his sharp winter takes over and freezes the laughter into shards. Winter that cracks across pools like trees with bones of glass. Winter, sweet sharp winter that bites too hard, takes over too fast.

Eames is a hole in his chest where there wasn't one already.

 

* * *

 

It's spring when he's fourteen and his mother is teaching him how to break bottles by the side of his house. _Like this_ , she says, and slaps the spindly bottle upon the bricks by the curb. Green glass crumples and falls in pieces to the ground. _Not too close to the neck. Like this._ Another bottle crashes in a shower of shards. She hands him a bottle, a new one, and his palm curls and fits snugly around the handle. _Now you._

 

* * *

 

Summer is Mombasa and the dirt underneath his fingernails. Summer is the feeling of restlessness all over, waking up dirty and too hot and drenched in sweat. The heat is alive, swallows everything, and the stench of muck is heavy, disgusting, a monstrous crawling thing that lives in sewers and arteries and the pipes feeding on the heart.

Arthur scrubs his skin so hard it becomes red and raw, and he still cannot lift the smell, the stench like shackles around his wrist. Arthur turns his gaze on Eames, on the lazy swirling curl of his tattoos, and he thinks of how good he looks there, how good the expanse of muscle looks, tangled in between soiled and sticky sheets, how they both looked so good, yesterday when the night offered a reprieve from the heat, how good their smiles and kisses taste.

The walls close in on him, the heat suffocates him like a spurned lover. Arthur is struck by the beauty and the grace and the most animal of instincts, a sparrow in a cupped palm looking to fight or to fly.

Summer is Arthur saying _I don't want to do this anymore_ , summer is Eames' eyes looking dark and morose and as far away from the punishing sun. Summer is the kitchen window nailed shut. Summer is the whiplash of words and a bloodless war, without proof, without witness, without a tether to the sky. Summer is freefall, letting go, being let go. Summer is the gap between the mind and heart. Summer is the secret of not wanting to let go.

 

* * *

 

It's spring when he's sixteen, when his mother's husband returns with a roaring bike and a bottle of pills and his coming-home present is a new set of bruises along her arm. She heaves a sob from her sparrowy chest and she keeps a gun in a safe beside the bed but she never uses it, the gun didn't want her the same way she does not want it back. But weapons choose their own owners and in spring bathed in fluorescent lamplight Arthur puts the first bullet into a stranger's brain.

 

* * *

 

Winter is an artist's paintbrush in Prague, paints the sky a lilting shade of purple, submerges the city in the scent of lavender and cold, graceful death. Where sheets of frost glaze over the frantic waterways and mime everything still, frost chameleoning across lost hidden windowpanes, frost like a puzzle piece filling the concave carvings of cathedrals.

Arthur watches himself lose track of Eames somewhere in Siberia, a face and a number gone like the snuffing of a hemisphere from the sun. Arthur feels the air freezing in his lungs, feels the unforgiving cold creeping, seeping under the pores of his bones, feels the tips of his fingers turn numb.

It's an entirely different war than summer, but there's the same absence of witnesses and proof and a tether like an embrace, and Arthur has always believed himself to love winter, sweet soothing winter like a child's lullaby, the same way he loves Prague and the sheet of ice over river water, but this time winter is a study in panic, winter is a shadow of clammy nothing, winter is alone and so very, very cold.

In winter Arthur waits, waits, waits for the tiniest scraps of news, cold metal cracking Arthur with terrified eyes and frantic whispers that no ears can catch, _where is he oh please oh please please please -_

 

* * *

 

He is eighteen and it's spring and the officer raps his knuckles on the door with awkward condolences and the remains of a body, and he whispers, _yes, I'm her son,_ because Arthur can belong to someone and something but nothing ever belongs to him. He says _I'm her son_ and the ice in the pool cracks, and the unwavering doppelganger of the moon splits in half. Arthur folds a broken house and a broken life and the memory of broken jagged bottle shards into a silver briefcase and takes it with him wherever he goes.

 

* * *

 

Kyoto is the town wedged between winter and summer, where the year is always beginning, this town of temples and lakes where flowers bloom in the middle of snow. Girls wear kimonos and sail through the stone-lined streets, the clip-clop of wooden sandals like the space where rain and concrete meet.

Arthur finds Eames near a golden temple in spring, _safe._ His head is low and his arms are linked and he's praying to a god that no longer exists. Sakura petals glimmer in and out of his hair like a playful sprite. Spring is Arthur coaxing out the words _thank God I found you_ from the burrows of his own heart. Spring is relief and forgiveness and Arthur breezes through spring with a briefcase in his hand, someone else's warmth in the other, someone else's words a flutter of music in his ear.

It's spring who teaches Arthur to break bottles on the curb and moulds a gun into his hand and uncloaks the world for him bare. Spring is not happy and spring may be a lie but it's spring who sketches him out from scratch, from the very first pencil scar upon the vast, upon the endless, infinite white paper sheet. Arthur's life begins with a series of springs.

If nothing else Arthur will always have spring, a thousand saplings poking their heads from under snow, a thousand slumbering words behind the fog of his tongue, a thousand paper cranes hanging from gentle branches of sakura trees. If nothing else Arthur has Eames.


End file.
